Nowadays, if you want to sell your house quickly and for top dollar, a coat of paint and a good cleaning aren’t enough. To inspire the all-important fantasy element that makes a buyer want to live there, you’ve got to romance it a little -- and that’s where home staging comes in.

In order to make the sale, your home has to be in its best possible condition. A professional Home Stager sees your home in the eyes of a prospective buyer and can make simple suggestions that could give your home that competitive edge.  Staged homes generally sell 30-50% faster than their unstaged competitors. Shirley Iida, of Showtime Staging and Redesign, says that staging is neither as expensive nor as daunting as you may think. You don’t need a truck load of rental furniture to stage your home, even if it’s vacant. It can be done tastefully, simply and affordably by taking the furniture you already have, rearrange it, add to it, or take away from it. Iida offers a service where she will come into your home and give you a list of ways to stage your home and then will either do the staging for you or let you do it yourself.

Think you can do it all yourself? A home stager will assess your home objectively, and work to maximize assets and minimize flaws, which can be harder than you think.  You need to emotionally detach from your home, especially if you’ve lived there a long time. It’s hard, but crucial, to let go and think of your house objectively as a product on a shelf. You need your potential buyers to see your house as a place they can picture themselves living in, not as the place you are currently living in, so you need to depersonalize and neutralize the space to make it appeal to a wide range of tests. Remove trophies, children’s artwork, religious artifacts, and family pictures; keep paint colours and art subtle.

Remember that part of why you bought in Whistler was the beautiful environment outside, and realize that to sell you need to take time to keep the inside environment just as enticing!